Louis C.K. on Why We All Need to Drop Our Cell Phones and Feel Things

I don’t have a very unique perspective on cell phones, I just know that I weep a little inside every time I write something down on an actual piece of paper and realize that my notes could only be deciphered by other serial killers, NSA and children because I’ve forgotten how to grip a pen.

I can’t even brag that I waited 27 years to get a cell phone and didn’t grow up with television, because I substituted with an iPod Touch that made me ignore just as many people and walk into just as many walls.

Insightful funnyman Louis C.K. is hurt by the fact that we are less imaginative, more impatient and increasingly slow-minded as a human race because of technology, believing that the addiction is caused by our inability to acknowledge our gaping black souls. (Shut up, Beavis.)

Here are some of his thoughts on the matter, from last week’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien:

You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty—forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there.

And sometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car, and you start going, ‘oh no, here it comes. That I’m alone.’ It’s starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it…

That’s why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they’re killing, everybody’s murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.

C.K. wraps it up in a mangled, chaotic little bow about us all expecting and getting used to life in general not being perfect:

And I go, ‘oh, I’m getting sad, gotta get the phone and write “hi” to like 50 people’…then I said, ‘you know what, don’t. Just be sad. Just let the sadness, stand in the way of it, and let it hit you like a truck.’

And I let it come, and I just started to feel ‘oh my God,’and I pulled over and I just cried like a bitch. I cried so much. And it was beautiful. Sadness is poetic. You’re lucky to live sad moments.

And then I had happy feelings. Because when you let yourself feel sad, your body has antibodies, it has happiness that comes rushing in to meet the sadness. So I was grateful to feel sad, and then I met it with true, profound happiness. It was such a trip.

The thing is, because we don’t want that first bit of sad, we push it away with a little phone or a jack-off or the food. You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your product, and then you die. So that’s why I don’t want to get a phone for my kids.

So in the ’80s it was cocaine then the ’90s had heroin and now it’s fucking iOS 7. Gag me with any spoon but the one from The Matrix.

(Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Dexter, Sons of Anarchy, Orphan Black and Orange is the New Black are also to blame in some way.)